Minding Gaps

Enrollment Opens for Master Class: Communication for Leadership

 

Venue for Master Class: Communication for Leadership

 

Over the years we have had success with our sophisticated Master Class: Communication for Leadership. Well-regarded companies such as Northwestern Mutual, Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Amgen, and Anheuser-Busch—to name only a handful—have used this engaging learning experience to take their organizations to the next level.

What makes Master Class stand out? Powerful, practical models that make sense. An affirming emphasis on servant leadership. A recognition of implicit messages on workplace priorities. An exploration of cultural forces. Top it off with plenty of real examples and colorful stories of what really works. It's all rather extraordinary for a seminar on communication.

Now, on a trial basis, we are offering Master Class by open enrollment. You can register by yourself, or you can sign up several of your colleagues as well, for a fast-paced, one-day overview. We will cover the highlights of the two-day immersion and three-day comprehensive sessions, which we also plan to offer by open enrollment in the future. You will leave this one-day session with a better understanding of leadership, engagement, and the communication that drives them.

Our first open-enrollment one-day Master Class seminar will take place in Lake Forest, Illinois, on Tuesday, June 26, 2012. The site is easily accessible by car or commuter train, and it is just 30 minutes from Chicago's O'Hare Airport or 45 minutes from Milwaukee's Mitchell Field. We’ll start at 9 am (doors open for continental breakfast and mingling at 8 am), and we will wrap up at 5 pm.

Please take a moment to read this course description of Master Class. Then let us know (by emailing us directly at info@arceil.com or by telephoning us at 650-464-1770) how many places we should hold for you. This seminar will fill quickly, so you'll be smart to act quickly to secure your seats.

The one-day Master Class overview has these benefits:

Bottom Line Value. Research shows that between 2.1 and 2.5 percent of an organization’s revenue is lost to the active disengagement of people. That’s as much as $2.5 million for every $100 million of revenue, and it is just for active disengagement. (Passive disengagement is more pervasive and adds still more to the cost.) Recover it, and it goes straight to the bottom line. Few such training programs pay for themselves so easily. This one clearly does.

Big Ideas, Big Impact. Leadership and management are two different things. So are engagement and alignment. The communication that drives leadership and engagement is different from that which drives management and alignment, too. Use the wrong one, and you get the wrong result. Master Class brings clarity and explanation to these critical distinctions. Executives will come to understand the importance of distributive leadership—after all, no one can be everywhere—and managers will learn why they must stand as collateral leaders of the enterprise.

Case Studies. We have scoured top-tier companies for best practices, and we bring them to you. You will see practical examples from companies like Harley-Davidson, Levi Strauss, Nordstrom, Starbucks, Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, Federal Express, and many others. You'll remember the vivid stories for years to come.

Analysis of Engagement. Master Class identifies five levels of engagement—creative engagement, active engagement, passive engagement, passive disengagement, and active disengagement—and then analyzes each for its consequences, behaviors, and antecedents.

Quantitative Data. Master Class presents hard, factual, quantitative data to explain the power and value of communication around business strategy. You and your managers will get facts and figures on change, trust, engagement and disengagement, perceptions of managers by employees, ROI, message clutter, employee frustrations, rumors, and so much more.

5th Degree Leadership. Modeled on the late Robert K. Greenleaf's advocacy of servant leadership, Master Class broaches difficult challenges of visible purpose, visible conviction, visible risk, visible authenticity, visible empathy, visible respect, visible confidence, visible humility, visible self-awareness, and visible vulnerability. We're no longer surprised that this chapter is among the most memorable and well-received of the entire session, even among technically trained managers such as engineers and scientists.

Robust Credibility. For leaders, trust is only the beginning of a credible connection to people. Leaders must also nurture credibility through confidence and affinity. We'll show how tenuous all three can be, and what you can do about it.

Practical, Proven Strategies. We have distilled our teaching down to neat lists of strategies and tactics. They all make abundant good sense, but many of these strategies never occurred to managers beforehand. Master Class puts them in your hands.

Evaluations of our workshops are consistently high. After sitting in a classroom for a day or longer, more than 95 percent of participants recommend Master Class for their peers and superiors.

Here’s what past participants have said about Master Class:

 

“This was a top-notch program directly geared [to] the success of managers. It was a continuing education program among peers.”

—a senior manager of a Fortune 100 consumer-products company

“I have worked for this agency for 25 years, and I have never had a day of in-service training as valuable as today’s.”

—scientist, agency of the U.S. government

“Excellent presenter, measured pauses, superb, enthusiastic, thought-provoking, excellent material, first-rate, will definitely recommend.”

—a guest participant

“I have gone through a lot of leadership training. This is one of the two best. The other was at Carnegie Mellon, and this workshop is more applicable to my day-to-day work.”

—senior engineer, aerospace company

“Tom is terrific! Original, enthusiastic, motivating . . . the lessons are applicable, useful, and real.”

—senior manager for an international food and beverage company

 

The fee for this one-day overview of Master Class is just $895 per person or $795 per person for four or more from one company, payable upon registration. We accept Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. All registrations are non-refundable, though if you must cancel we will be happy to apply your fee to a future session.

Remember, registrations are strictly limited by the capacity of the room, so you will want to act fast.

Call us (at 650-464-1770) or write to us (at info@arceil.com) to indicate your interest, and we'll get back to you right away.

 

Ozzie Guillen's Foul Ball on Fidel Castro

by Thomas J. Lee

Every business manager, government official, and aspiring entrepreneur should sit up and pay rapt attention to the ordeal that Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillén is going through this week—and then remember to choose her words very, very carefully.

A native of Venezuela, where he still has a home, Guillén has enjoyed a long and successful career as a baseball player and manager. He managed the Chicago White Sox to a World Series championship. After leaving the White Sox last autumn, he signed with the Miami Marlins, who have just built a shiny new stadium in the Little Havana section of Miami. The city's million-strong community of Cuban Americans is the heart of the Marlins' fan base.

After only five days as Marlins manager, Guillén is interrupting a road trip to fly back to Miami and apologize after telling Time magazine of his admiration for Cuba strongman Fidel Castro. Guillén had gone so far as to say he loved and respected Castro for remaining in power so very long. No mention of machine guns, firing squads, 30-year prison terms, or anything of the sort.

You can read all about it for yourself in these dispatches from the Miami Herald, Bloomberg, and the Associated Press.

Regular readers of the Minding Gaps blog know that I generally advise leaders in business, government, and any other sphere to "say what you think, and think what you say."

However, there are five important boundaries on that advice. I call them the 5Rs. You should speak only when your thoughts are "5R Ready."

So before you say what you think, make sure it is:

• real, which is to say based on observable facts and familiar experience;
• relevant to the challenge at hand;
• respectful of people and their feelings;
• relationally constructive, not destructive; and
• reasonable and rational, by which we mean both within the bounds of reason and logically derived by reasoning.

If it isn't, you should be asking yourself some tough-love questions as to why you're even thinking such things. They're toxic to you and everyone else. Before you speak, get your head together.

Ozzie Guillén's remarks to Time magazine met none of these five tests. They didn't come close.

If I were advising Guillén, I would suggest not going before a bank of microphones. Rather, he should be sitting down with Miami's ex-pat community and just listening to its voices. Then, after coming to a better understanding of Castro, he should apologize without using the words "if I have."

Maybe, just maybe, he can survive. No bets though.

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

University of Illinois President's Stormy Tenure Is A Sad Case Study

by Thomas J. Lee

Michael Hogan's stormy tenure as president of the University of Illinois, and his resignation yesterday after only twenty months on the job, offers yet another case study on the importance of humble, servant leadership and on the critical role of respectful, mutual communication as its energy and light.

Here are a few articles for background: the Chicago Tribune's account of the resignation, the Chronicle of Higher Education's report, and the Chronicle's earlier piece (from March 8) on Hogan's communication problem with faculty at the University's flagship Urbana-Champaign campus. It is a sad case study indeed.

My main question is intended to spark more intellectual curiosity than anxiety, but I cannot help expressing it with a tone of frustration: Just when will leaders learn?

If anyone should have had some sensitivity to the challenge of real leadership, you'd think it would be a historian of diplomacy like Hogan. But no, even he committed some of the most egregious blunders we have seen in quite some time. Read the three articles to see for yourself.

Last month the University's faculty protested. More than a hundred of its senior professors, the big names the University of Illinois cannot afford to lose, called for his ouster. Their complaints were classic: micromanaging, arrogance, bullying, insularity, and more. Above all, the complaints zeroed in on a profound lack of respect and empathy for the people Hogan sought to lead. Like too many leaders, he seemed to think it was all about him.

The situation boiled over this week. Hogan said he had had enough, and he decided to quit.

I fear that many putative leaders in business are in similar situations, but in their case, people don't speak out for fear of retribution in an uncertain economy. (The senior professors who called for Hogan's resignation are protected by academic tenure.) 

Hogan, and leaders everywhere, would do well to heed the words of Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th century British leader: "I must follow my people," Disraeli said. "Am I not their leader?"

 

© Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

More Employers Ask Job Applicants for Facebook Passwords

by Thomas J. Lee

I am not the least surprised, but I certainly am flabbergasted, that more employers are asking job applicants for Facebook passwords.

It isn't surprising, because many companies have long misunderstood the concept of trust in the workplace. They have assumed that employees should just naturally trust them, without themselves first earning the trust of employees or first investing the same kind of trust in employees.

Life just doesn't work that way. Trust is and always has been a two-way street. It must be earned, and it must be shown. He who doesn't trust is only rarely and briefly accorded any trust. That is as true in our professional lives as in our personal lives.

Trust is far too precious and far too tender to be treated as if it can be presumed or commanded.

If not surprising, these policies are nonetheless flabbergasting. They set the tone for brazen disregard for employee dignity. What company would want employees who are so deferential, so servile, as to tolerate that? 

If I were in charge of the hiring at these companies, I might actually ask for a Facebook password just to see which job applicants would refuse to provide it despite expecting that it would cost them the job. Those are the applicants I would be inclined to hire. In the long run, they will stand up for integrity and for their own dignity. How refreshing.

Give me an employee who knows right from wrong, smart from stupid, trust from mistrust, decent from indecent. I can build a fine company with people like that.

 

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

Goldman Sachs Replies to Mr. Smith

 

Here is a response from Goldman Sachs to the essay by Greg Smith published in this morning's editions of The New York Times and referenced in my own blog post (just scroll down).

Backlash Against Goldman Sachs Op-Ed Writer Begins in Earnest - Business - The Atlantic Wire.

In the interest of fairness, I recommend reading it as well as Mr. Smith's essay.

TJL

Greg Smith's Very Public Resignation

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Until today, Greg Smith was executive director and head of the U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Goldman Sachs.

He resigned out of disgust—that isn't too strong a word, as you will see—with Goldman's culture of putting profits before customers. Moreover, he submitted his letter of resignation to The New York Times, which obliged him by printing it today. Online and in print, it's fair to say that millions of people will ultimately read it.

You can read it for yourself here: Greg Smith resigns from Goldman Sachs. Don't miss it.

Reasonable people can debate whether Mr. Smith should have gone public with his thoughts. The fact is he did. It's done, and his thoughts are out there.

In his shoes I wouldn't have done the same thing, but if it compels Goldman and other large investment banks to rethink and change their culture, then it may be worth it.

Here are some questions for any business leader to think about:

• Do you think Goldman's senior management has viewed its culture the same way Mr. Smith describes it?
• Do you think Goldman's executive team regards the firm's culture as "the secret sauce" of its success, to use Mr. Smith's phrasing?
• How important is your own firm's culture? How would you describe it, and how do you think others in the company describe it? How do customers describe what they see of it?
• Does your organization truly put the customer before the profit? In what ways do you see this as the reality?
• How should you change the culture of your organization? How can you?

 

 © Copyright 2012   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

A Case Study in Poor Executive Communication

Here is an unfortunate but instructive case study on executive leadership that underestimates and undervalues the challenge of communication as the energy of leadership.

It involves the troubled president of the University of Illinois, and it appeared in the Chicago Tribune today.

U. of I. president says he did poor job of connecting with faculty.

 

Of Champions and Leaders

Two years ago in this space we waxed eloquent on the amazing final holes of the British Open. Any weekend duffer who has ever pretended to hear the roar of the gallery while approaching the 18th green will recall the thrill that ageless Tom Watson, then 59 years old, gave us that July weekend in 2009. Here is what we wrote:

by Thomas J. Lee

If love like youth is wasted on the young, as Sammy Cahn wrote, so perhaps is sport. Yes, everyone savors the thrill of victory. Yes, everyone feels the sting of defeat. But only the properly aged among us can bask in the warmth of an ever-flickering candle of one more time, just one more time.

For anyone of a certain age or better, watching 59-year-old Tom Watson on the final holes and then in the playoff of the British Open at Turnberry, Scotland, today was to indulge in a little reverie.

Watson had earned his first Open championship in 1975, years before some of the other professional golfers of today were born. But here he was again, where he wasn’t supposed to be. Hadn’t he graduated to the senior tour a decade ago?

In the end, Watson squandered a one-stroke lead on the 72nd hole to end the four rounds in a two-way tie. Then, in a four-hole playoff, he drove into the rough and finally lost to Stewart Cink.

The victor is a relatively unheralded American, but he is no youngster himself. Winning his first major championship today at the age of 36, Cink is already three years older than Watson was when he won the last of his eight majors, 26 years ago.

Nevertheless, the story of the day belonged to Watson, still in the hunt after all these years.

“It would have been a helluva story,” Watson said afterward. “It would have been a helluva story, but it wasn’t to be.”

The spectacle took me back to a triathlon in St. Petersburg, Florida, several years ago. I was competing in the 40-something age group. Having swum a mile in Tampa Bay and ridden the 25-mile bike course through the streets of old St. Pete, I was running strong only a couple of miles from the finish line.

My legs still felt fine, and I was thoroughly enjoying the experience when a pretty young woman, probably half my age, pulled up alongside me. For a few minutes, our banter made me feel as if I were in my 20s again.

Then she casually remarked, “You know, when my dad gets to be your age, I sure hope he is in your shape.”

Her well-intended words were like a brick wall in my path. Could I actually be older than her dad?

Nah. You don't think, do you? Suddenly I felt like walking, or crawling.

My legs slowed. I felt weak. Keeping the same pace we’d both been running a few seconds earlier, she sprinted ahead.

Age, it now seems to me, is permission to reflect and appreciate in ways we couldn’t, or just didn’t, when we were rushing headlong into life. Tom Watson seems to know that intuitively.

Reflecting aloud today in the clubhouse after the last hole, he asked himself what impressions or insights he would take away from the week’s experience. He thought a moment and answered: “A lot of warmth, a lot of spirituality.” It was scarcely the answer of a brash young man.

The ageless golfer is a gentleman who knows what it means to be a gentleman. He has always let his integrity do the heavy lifting of inspiration.

No one should forget his courageous decision in 1990 to resign from a Kansas City country club after it refused membership to a Jewish couple. He explained his reasoning only privately, but when the club reversed its policy, he rejoined immediately and publicly. There was no loud grandstanding, and yet there was no mistaking the message.

Stewart Cink won the British Open today, and my hat is off to him. He deserves to be congratulated. But in my book Tom Watson is the real champion. Thank you, Mr. Watson, for a marvelous weekend of golf, and thank you for the splendid example you continue to give to us all.

 

*     *     *

Two years later, Tom Watson, now 61, is competing in the British Open again this weekend, and as of today he is only nine strokes off the lead at Royal St. George in Kent, England. [He would finish the tournament eleven strokes off. The winner was 42-year-old Darren Clarke of Northern Ireland.]

Of equal note, Watson was coincidentally paired with his namesake, Tom Lewis, a 20-year-old amateur whose parents so loved golf and so respected Watson they named their newborn son after the golfing legend. Imagine the thrill it must be for the youngster to be sharing the fairways with him.

Some things get better with age, and Mr. Watson is one of them. 

 

Coming on Monday

{Numbers} Trust in Management

 

Coming on Wednesday

How Leaders Must Manage Themselves

(Third of Four Parts)

 © Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

My Dad, a Humble Profile in Leadership

 

We are on our annual study and renewal period through June 30. During this time we will reprise some of our favorite posts of the preceding twelve months. We'll return with all-new essays on Friday, July 1.

A year ago this weekend, the Chicago Tribune published my Father's Day tribute to my late dad. We reprise it today.

 —TJL                         

by Thomas J. Lee

A fellow blogger posed an interesting question online, in anticipation of Father's Day. He asked: What kind of leader was your father?

I had to think a moment. My dad, who passed away in 2007 at the age of 93, was a wonderful man. But probably most people did not regard him as a leader. He wasn't an elected official. Nor was he a high-powered executive. Nor was he active in politics or community affairs.

Yet leadership is not only for the powerful and the prominent. Millions of people offer profoundly inspirational leadership in their everyday lives. So it was with my father. He lived a life of humility, decency, authenticity, and commitment.

Naturally outgoing and happy, he exercised quiet self-control even in the face of considerable adversity. He didn't lose his temper. He didn't curse or cheat or lie. He didn't gamble or drink to excess. He hated war, but he went, and his unit liberated Dachau. In 75 years of driving a car he never had an accident, not even a fender bender. He never even got a traffic ticket. In short, he was a rock, always there when it counted.

Most important, he knew how to love, and he did. The late Ann Landers, who could tell us a thing or two about families, often wrote that the greatest gift a father can give to his children is to love their mother completely, deeply, and unconditionally.

My four brothers and I were the beneficiaries of just such a gift. For more than six decades, probably from the moment he first noticed her at another soldier's wedding in Chicago, my dad loved my mom, and he let it show. He loved her completely. He loved her deeply, and he loved her unconditionally.

I have a particularly warm memory, framed like an old faded photograph in my mind's eye. When I was 10 or 12, I would wander into the kitchen before dinner, only to find my dad and my mom in a bear hug of an embrace while potatoes simmered on the stove.

Such a warm sense of security washed over me. Some of my friends had parents who yelled at each other. Others had parents who brooded in silence. Not I. Not my brothers. We had a security blanket up over our shoulders and snug under our chins. We had the luxury of never, ever worrying.

My dad always loved my mom, and my mom always loved my dad, and that's the way it was. It was just that simple and it was just that wonderful and it was always just that way.

Only a few weeks before my mother died in 2004, I visited the two of them in their apartment in Florida. What I witnessed on that visit was like a scene out of an old black-and-white movie starring Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson or Donna Reed.

My mother sat at the kitchen table, her days so very numbered, and yet with a smile of calm, divine peace across her face, as my dad, a gifted tenor who had once aspired to the operatic stage, sang love song after love song to her. He must have sung for an hour, maybe two, and he sang from his heart. He sang: "Everybody loves my baby, but my baby don't love nobody but me." My mother died a happy woman, for she was loved.

Most of all, I remember Dad as a man who worked hard, who made the most of what he had, who lived his life with passion for his art as well as for his wife, who humbled himself and honored others, who recognized duty, and who devoted himself to the things that matter, which is to say, to the people around him.

Will you abide one last anecdote? It is from the day I learned to swim. I tell it because it says so much about the man my father was.

There was to be a kind of commencement exercise at the old YMCA pool in my hometown. All the kids would swim the length of the pool, and then, one by one, we were to be called up by name and given a certificate.

Now it's odd what we remember from our childhood. Of that day, I remember a feeling of anxiety, knowing that my mother was home with my little brothers, and my dad was at work.

Back then, Dad always had to work on Saturday mornings. So the other kids would have families in the gallery cheering them on. But not I. I was on my own. That would be okay. I could handle it. I would be fine. I would just buck it up.

So one by one, in alphabetical order, the instructor called the names of all the swimmers. I remember hearing the instructor call out Ade, and Bobby, and Mike, and Steve. And one by one, each of them walked over to get his certificate as the gallery erupted in cheers.

The closer the instructor got to my name, the more alone I felt. I braced myself for a little polite applause from the other parents. The instructor called my name. I got up, walked over, and reached out for my certificate.

Sure enough, the applause was polite. But just then a voice rang out from the gallery, loud and clear and echoing around the pool: "Way to go, Tommy!"

I looked up. It was my dad. Somehow, he had got off work, and he had made it over to the YMCA to watch me get that certificate.

Ever since, whenever I have needed some encouragement, I have harked back to those few words, and I have picked up the pace and tried a little harder. My dad's voice is never far away. He is my cheerleader, even now, after he is gone.

By my measure, this is certainly the stuff of leadership. My dad was an ordinary, everyday hero. His achievement in life wasn't winning an election or getting a big promotion or living in a fancy house. Rather, it was leading a fine, long life and filling it with honor and love.

And so now, for another Father's Day without him, it's my turn, and I just hope he can hear me: "Way to go, Dad! Way to go!

 

Coming on Monday

 The Business Case for Communication on Change

 

 © Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   All rights reserved.

One Year Later, a Persistent Reminder and Prodding to BP

 

On the eve of the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, we call BP's attention to our special report and comment of August 18, 2010, outlining a comprehensive approach to best practice in leadership and integrated communication for workplace safety.

We believe it continues to be timely and relevant.

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

{Numbers} Silicon Valley CEOs Work in Glass Houses

 

Numbers, a twice-monthly feature, regularly presents business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It appears on the first and third Monday of each month.

Since its inception two years ago, Numbers has presented data on a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, nonverbal communication, fear in the workplace, and many other variables.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button atop the right column.

by Thomas J. Lee

Glassdoor.com compiles data on compensation, cultures, and chief executives at companies around the world. Anyone can access the data for almost any company of significant size.

Oddly, the employee approval ratings for CEOs of high-tech companies are the only ones that regularly make news. That creates public accountability for one industry. However, it leaves employees, investors, and customers of companies in other industries to do their own research. You can do it, but it's laborious.

In the most recent period, outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt ranks highest among his Silicon Valley peers: 96 percent of Google employees approved of his performance as chief executive. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, on medical leave, is right up there, too, at 95 percent.

In contrast, Steve Ballmer at Microsoft came in at only 40 percent, a decrease of six points from his approval one year earlier.

Yahoo's Carol Bartz saw her approval drop the most, from 77 percent to just 50 percent. John Donahoe of eBay improved the most, from 24 percent a year ago to 46 percent now.

A few questions to reflect upon:

• How would well-publicized employee approval ratings of leaders in your company affect their leadership?
• Have you checked your CEO's approval rating on glassdoor.com?
• Should leaders make decisions in fear or favor of employee approval? 

 

Coming on Wednesday

Counterfeit Currency of Leadership

 

©  Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Accountability or Missed Opportunity? FAA Official Is Out

by Thomas J. Lee

The New York Times is reporting that the U.S. government's official in charge of air traffic controllers for the Federal Aviation Administration has resigned after night-shift controllers at five airports were found to have been asleep on duty.

As severe an issue as this is, the official's dismissal (and that's really what it is) raises three important questions:

• Is this a powerful example of accountability or an equally vivid example of scapegoating?
• Should we expect and even demand that heads roll in situations like this?
• Or should we dig deeper in search of systemic causes that may otherwise persist long after the official's departure?

In the wake of these incidents, the FAA has already changed its policy to ensure that each of the busiest airports in the United States will have at least two air-traffic controllers on duty at night. Previously it was just one controller working alone. The solitude and darkness were too much for some of them to stay awake.

The Refreshing Humility of Butler coach Brad Stevens

by Thomas J. Lee

Many of you are watching a lot of exciting college basketball this weekend, as first the surviving sixteen and then the surviving eight men's teams compete in the second weekend of the annual NCAA Division I Tournament, otherwise known as March Madness. Yesterday's two games were both thrilling. Butler defeated Florida by just three points, and UConn defeated Arizona by only two, to advance to next weekend's Final Four.

After the Butler-Florida game, I was struck by the humility of Butler coach Brad Stevens. Looking at Stevens, who is all of 34 years old and appears to be even younger, you just wonder if he is remotely up to the task of big leadership.

I'll admit to being a little jaded. In the consulting and training I do, it's common to come across ambitious young managers whose instincts on leadership are about as wrongheaded as they can be. They are so eager to get things done, they make every mistake their elders made and then some, and all the while they just assume they are smarter, wiser, and better. It's a shame. Ego can be a powerful driver of performance, but it can also be an obstacle to learning and to professional or personal growth.

Something about the young Butler coach is different, profoundly different, from those young managers. Not only has Brad Stevens proved his mettle by taking a team to the Final Four two years in a row, he has done so with a refreshing humility and abundant self-effacing tribute to others.

Talking to a TV reporter on the basketball court moments after the final buzzer yesterday, Stevens was ever classy. He said he was plainly "out-coached" by Florida's Billy Donovan, and he credited his Butler players with coming to his own rescue.

Curious about that rare humility, I did a little digging on the Internet. I quickly learned that Stevens is "not about the money," in his own words. He isn't in coaching for fame or glory or riches. He is in it because he loves the game. It is that simple. After four winning seasons he signed a long-term contract with Butler University despite its modest size and obscurity. He is there through the 2021-2022 season.

I also learned that Stevens was humbled early this season after his team, which had gone all the way to the championship game a year ago and ultimately lost to Duke on a buzzer-beating shot that almost went in, got off to a disappointing 4-4 start last fall. Butler was dragging a three-game losing streak.

Stevens knew that Donovan was a man of uncommon generosity and good will, always eager to help other coaches. He also knew that the Florida Gators had gone to the Final Four two years in a row under Donovan in 2006 and 2007, and he knew that he wanted his Butler Bulldogs to replicate that feat against some very long odds. So he put in a call to Donovan for advice.

Here's an interview with both coaches, taped the day before yesterday's big game, about their conversation last December. After that conversation, Butler went on to win 23 of its next 28 games, including Saturday's overtime victory that kocked Donovan's team out of the NCAA championship. 

 

 

Refreshing, isn't it?

Stick with me now: As regular readers know, over the preceding two weeks in this space we have discussed the concept of robust credibility, a higher level of credibility that leaders require in order to lead effectively. (You can begin reading those essays here.) I wasn't remotely thinking of Brad Stevens when I wrote those essays, but as a leader he certainly is working at the intersection of authentic trust, organic respect, and a bond of affinity. There's no question about that. If you want a role model, he is a good one.

We will have more to say about March Madness and leadership communication tomorrow. Be sure to come back.

 

Coming on Monday

March Madness and Leadership Communication 

 

© Copyright 2011   Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

What Is Your Change Quotient?

by Thomas J. Lee

Everyone is familiar with IQ, and anyone who keeps up with popular psychology is familiar with EQ, a parallel calculation based not on cognitive ability but on emotional intelligence.

Today we are introducing another, similar metric. We call it CQ, for change quotient. It reflects neither intellectual capability nor emotional strength. Rather, it measures capacity for change.

You apply it not to individuals but to whole organizations. It measures how much and how well your entire company (or association, or team, or batallion, or garage band, or whatever) is changing, not how well a particular person is doing.

It is only intended as a rough, quick measure. What it lacks in academic rigor, it makes up in ease and convenience.

Here is how it works.

Just poll a cross-section of managers and employees. Ask them all to give the entire organization three subjective scores between 1 and 5—whole numbers only, the better their assessment the higher the number—on how fast it moves through change, how much it needs to continue or begin changing, and how wise or prudent its present course of change is.

Add the three numbers together; the sum will be a whole number between 3 and 15. Multiply it by 10. We'll call it A. This is your numerator.

Now invite the same people to answer the same questions about your competition generally. Ask them to assign a single score to all the entities in your marketplace (despite the likelihood of variability among them), giving any benefit of the doubt to better and faster-changing companies, as they are setting the pace for the future. You are seeking a composite score for the entire marketplace.

Calculate it similarly (taking care to multiply the sum by 10, just as you did before) and write it down. Let's call it B. This is your denominator.

Now divide A by B and multiply by 100. The result is your CQ, your change quotient.

Theoretically, it can be as little as 20 and as high as 500. We expect most companies to score somewhere between 50 and 200.

A score of 100 would mean that, in the view of the employees you polled, your company is just keeping up.

The higher the score, and especially if it is well into the triple figures, the faster you are already changing relative to your competitors, the more your people recognize the need to change, and the more likely your change is on course.

The lower your score, and especially if it is mired deep in the double digits, the less all that is true, and the more work you have to do.

Try it out and let me know how it works.

 

Coming on Monday

Part One of a Five-Part Series on Robust Credibility

 

 © Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

Turbocharge Your Change with Our Boot Camp for Managers

  

For more recent posts on leadership, communication,

change, and engagement of employees, just scroll down.

 

 

You may work in a high-performance organization. Perhaps your company is already on a list of best places to work, either locally or nationally. Perhaps your employee survey scores are above the norm. Perhaps you are an employer of choice.

Or you may work in a challenging environment. Perhaps you have a rumor mill that moves at warp speed. Perhaps you have front-line supervisors who are openly cynical. Perhaps your employee surveys come back with low marks for "open and honest communication."

Or—and more likely—you may work at an organization, large or small, that is good but could be a whole lot better.

Wherever you are on this continuum, you and your managers can benefit hugely from our Boot Camp in Strategic Leadership Communication. High-performance companies can move to the next level. Struggling organizations can begin to get their act together. Middle-of-the-road companies can identify their next opportunities for improvement.

A great deal is at stake. Because the competition is always changing, no organization can remain where it is. Always, you are either improving or worsening relative to competitors. Product quality, personnel costs, employee engagement, and ultimately customer satisfaction and your profitability are on the line. At the very least, as our economy recovers, every company must worry about retaining the loyalty of its talent.

We have a solution: our Boot Camp in Strategic Leadership Communication, an intense, sophisticated, on-site workshop that changes the way managers and supervisors communicate business strategy and information, manage their own priorities, and build affirming relationships of mutual dignity and respect.

Here are just some of the benefits of Boot Camp:

Bottom Line Value. Research shows that between 2.1 and 2.5 percent of an organization’s revenue is lost to the active disengagement of people. That’s as much as $2.5 million for every $100 million of revenue, and it is just for the active disengagement. (Passive engagement adds still more to the cost.) Recover it, and it goes straight to the bottom line.

Big Impact. Leadership and management are two different things. So are engagement and alignment. (Remember this: “Assign to align. On page to engage.”) The communication that drives each is different, too. Use the wrong one, and you get the wrong result. We bring clarity and explanation to these important distinctions. Executives will understand the importance of distributive leadership—after all, no one can be everywhere—and managers will understand why they must stand up as collateral leaders of the enterprise.

Practical Examples. We have scoured top-tier companies for best practices, and we bring them to you. Your managers will see practical examples from companies like Harley-Davidson, Levi Strauss, Nordstrom, Starbucks, Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, and many others. Your people will remember the vivid stories for years to come.

Quantitative Data. We present hard, factual, quantitative data to support our argument on the power and value of communication around business strategy. You and your managers will get facts and figures on change, trust, engagement and disengagement, perceptions of managers by employees, ROI, message clutter, employee frustrations, rumors, and so much more.

Simple, Powerful Models. Our flagship models, the Rainbow and the GearBox, have been used by such iconic companies as Pfizer, Anheuser-Busch, Harley-Davidson, Royal Dutch Shell, FMC, John Deere, Northwestern Mutual, and the legendary Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. The Rainbow Model identifies unintended, and previously unnoticed, credibility gaps: mixed messages, muddled messages, mute messages. Another model, the GearBox, serves as both a structure and a self-assessment tool at the intersection of strategy and employee engagement. We guarantee you will find them enlightening.

Robust Credibility. Any leader is communicating constantly, often (and most especially) when he is least aware of it. We hammer home the point that communication is anything—verbal or nonverbal, explicit or implicit—that either conveys information or creates meaning. That forces managers to rethink their routine, their habits, and their own unnoticed behavioral ticks, for those nasty, inadvertent messages they didn’t intend to send—but did, more than once.

Talk Traps. The work of leading people isn’t easy. If it were, anyone could do it well. But we have been around long enough to know the landscape of difficulties—and talk traps are a big one. Inexperienced or unskilled leaders often run into the classic talk traps: small talk, sunny talk, scare talk, sweet talk, smart talk, simple talk, song and dance talk, slick talk, snarky talk, self talk, or snarl talk. What they should rely on is straight talk. But even that isn’t easy. We’ll take your team through the challenge of straight talk, so that they can do it right.

Healthy Culture. Good communication of business information in a company is more than a process. It is a culture. In a healthy culture, communication is clear, credible, compelling, constructive, continuous, collaborative, civil, and concise. For each, we have powerful diagnostic questions that will open eyes, minds, and hearts to change.

Practical, Proven Strategies. We have distilled our teaching down to neat lists of strategies and tactics. They all make abundant good sense, but many of them never occurred to managers beforehand. 

 

Boot Camp is available in a one-day or two-day format. It can be customized to your industry, your strategy, and your legacy. Leading companies in manufacturing, technology, finance, retail, and service industries have made it a staple of their professional development.

Evaluations of our workshops are consistently high. After sitting in a windowless room for a day or two, more than 95 percent of participants recommend the experience for their peers and superiors. Here’s what past participants have said:

 

“This was a top-notch program directly geared [to] the success of managers. It was a continuing education program among peers.”

—a senior manager of a Fortune 100 consumer-products company

“I have worked for this agency for 25 years, and I have never had a day of in-service training as valuable as today’s.”

—scientist, agency of the U.S. government

“Excellent presenter, measured pauses, superb, enthusiastic, thought-provoking, excellent material, first-rate, will definitely recommend.”

—a guest participant

“I have gone through a lot of leadership training. This is one of the two best. The other was at Carnegie Mellon, and this workshop is more applicable to my day-to-day work.”

—senior engineer, aerospace company

“Tom is terrific! Original, enthusiastic, motivating . . . the lessons are applicable, useful, and real.”

—senior manager for an international food and beverage company

Call or write now for special pricing and best availability.

 
+1-847-247-2241
info@arceil.com 

What, and Who, Is a Communicator?

by Thomas J. Lee

Who is a communicator? What is a communicator?

The short answer is: someone who communicates. But everyone communicates, for better or for worse. Yet we don't call everyone a communicator, do we?

Maybe we should.

In large companies, communicator is shorthand for all those people in staff positions who bring their talent and skill to bear on communicating for the companies that employ them. They are speechwriters, publicists, editors, designers, producers, Website managers, technicians, photographers, and public-affairs representatives. (Full disclosure: I myself worked as an executive speechwriter for the CEO of a Fortune 25 company some years ago.)

The same word is also used, approvingly, to describe senior executives with a knack for speaking clearly, perhaps even eloquently, to large audiences and to the news media. Just as Ronald Reagan was once described as "the great communicator," so a CEO may be described. Alas, not many are.

But I am going after a bigger point.

Especially in a time when social media can so greatly amplify anyone's voice and so heavily influence public opinion, shouldn't all employees be regarded as communicators? For that matter, shouldn't all stakeholders of any sort be regarded as communicators: customers, investors, suppliers, retirees, employees, and more?

The question, it seems to me, is whether anyone is not a communicator. At the risk of confusing things with a double negative, I think not.

I recall a best-practice benchmarking visit I paid some years ago to 3M, the diversified manufacturing company based in St. Paul, Minnesota. When asked how many communicators the company employed, a senior executive replied: 72,385 or thereabouts (I forget the precise figure, but that's close).

I thought he had misunderstood the question, as I was expecting an answer in three digits, not five. No, he replied emphatically, he had clearly understood the question, he had already given it some thought, and he was standing by his answer.

Of course, the figure he cited just happened to be the number of people employed by 3M. And that was before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were dominating our day-to-day reality.

His point was that all employees communicate with and about the company. Moreover, because the company took seriously the importance of two-way communication, it couldn't very well label as communicators only those few people who communicate officially and professionally on behalf of the company. The people they were communicating with—not just to, remember—had to be communicators as well. If they were not, then the conversation was rather lopsided.

Ever since, I have been bemused whenever I hear the word communicator applied only to staff professionals, and all the more so now that social media are so central to our lives. Every company has a lot more communicators than it pays to communicate. They are already communicating quite well, and all the more loudly today than just a few years ago.

 

Coming on Friday

 What Is Your Company's Change Quotient?

 

(c) Copyright 2011     Thomas J. Lee     All rights reserved.

{Numbers} Shareholder Return Rises With Employee Engagement

 

Numbers, a twice-monthly feature, regularly presents business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. Formerly known as By the Numbers, it appears on the first and third Monday of each month.

Since its inception in mid-2009, Numbers has presented data on a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business, information overload, strategic communication, CEO compensation, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, the productivity of meetings, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling through the archives. For a particular subject, use the search button atop the right column.

 

by Thomas J. Lee

The financial value of employee engagement has long been obvious to some managers, particularly those who appreciate the importance of psychological anchors such as pride, belonging, and meaning on both the quality and the quantity of work, and those who understand the systematic role of communication in creating engagement.

But to managers who focus first and last on mechanical drivers of performance, such as unmistakable authority and the certainty of accountability, the financial metrics of engagement are not so plain to see. To them, engagement has largely seemed a wasteful annoyance.

Now we have new data to prove the business case for high employee engagement. It turns out to go beyond the bottom line and straight to the curve on the shareholder return graph.

New research by Hewitt Associates, which was recently acquired by Aon Consulting, has found that companies with relatively high levels of employee engagement (at least 65 percent) outperform the total stock market. They posted shareholder returns 19 percent higher than the average in 2009, the most recent year for which comparisons are available.

Meanwhile, companies with very low engagement (less than 40 percent) underperformed the total stock market. They posted returns 44 percent lower than the average for the same period.

That's a total difference of 63 percentage points attributable to employee engagement, which, as we know from other reputable studies, is driven by nothing so much as clear, compelling, credible, collaborative communication.

If this doesn't make the business case for a strategic process of internal communication in support of engaging employees, nothing will. After all, how many other processes or improvements can even come close?

 

Coming Wednesday

Just What, and Who, Is a Communicator?

 

(c) Copyright 2011    Thomas J. Lee    All rights reserved.

How Do Great Bosses Communicate?

 

By Thomas J. Lee

Have you ever thought about differences in communication style between really good managers and really bad ones? Between managers with an excited, eager team of people, on the one hand, and managers with employees who are anything but excited and eager, on the other hand?

Here is a little exercise. It first appeared in this space almost two years ago. Recently a reader asked us to tweak it and republish it.

Take out a sheet of paper, and make two lists. Headline one list Best Boss. Headline the other list Worst Boss.

Now think back over your entire work history. Take it all the way back to your first part-time job as a teenager. Bring it forward to the job you have today. Zero in on the boss or bosses you have had for each job. Of all these bosses, pick your best boss of all time, and pick your worst.

Visualize them both. Remember everything you can about them and about your experience of working for them. Recall details, conversations, casual remarks, decisions, and explanations, if any. Recall your feelings, your productivity, your efficiency, and the quality of your work.

Now think about the level of trust and engagement on the team. Recall the amount and depth of information you had, where it came from, and how quickly you learned news. Recall your emotions as you arrived at work each day. Recall how you felt about yourself and your future.

Finally, think about your willingness to take risks, to volunteer opinions, to ask tough questions, to make observations unseen by others. Recall anything that fleshes out the boss’s temperament, judgment, leadership, and integrity.

Next, for the best boss and for the worst, answer these questions and briefly record your recollections on each list, respectively: 

• What adjectives would you use to describe each boss?
• What did the best boss know about leading people, and what did the worst boss need to learn? How were their paths on leadership development similar or dissimilar?
• How did the best boss listen, and how did the worst? (Describe their physical posture and expression, their verbal cues, their curiosity, their recollection, and their application of insights.)
• What was each boss’s attitude toward sharing strategic business information?
• How much did the best boss care about you as a person, apart from your role as an employee? How much did the worst boss? What evidence and feelings do you recall to support your conclusion? Were there any consequences of the difference?
• Did either or both have a vision for you and your future in the organization?
• What were each manager's expectations for you and the quality of your work?
• To what extent did each boss teach and mentor you?
• How much was each manager’s day-to-day behavior congruent or incongruent with his or her stated values? What examples can you cite?
• Did you sense that either boss or both bosses had favorite employees with whom they consulted and collaborated, more so than with others on the team?
• How would you describe the social environment of trust on each team? Who trusted whom? How much?
• How candid was each boss? How candid were you with each boss?
• What was your own level of engagement with each?

And one more question, as a bonus: To what extent did the variability between these bosses contribute to the performance of the respective teams and of the larger organization?

Finally, look over the two lists. Reflect on them, and ask yourself the $64,000 question: How would people who have worked for you describe you and their experience of working for you?

Ponder these questions, your own responses, and your anticipated responses of people who have worked for you. If the spirit moves you, capture your learning and write to me at tom@arceil.com. If you prefer to talk by telephone, provide your contact details so that I can reach you on the run. (I strive to be accessible.)

I think you will find the exercise very, very worthwhile.

 

For professional facilitation of this exercise,

call us at +1-847-247-2241.

 

(c) Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   All rights reserved.

Miscommunication and the Shuttle Challenger, 25 Years Ago Today

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Twenty-five years ago this morning, New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe and six astronauts settled into the Challenger space shuttle for what they expected would be a seven-day orbital mission. It lasted instead 73 seconds.

We pause today to remember the heroism of the crew, their sacrifice to science, and the sad role of miscommunication in the disaster.

The subsequent investigation established beyond doubt that if only officials and engineers had spoken with clarity and cogency and had listened with intellectual curiosity and good faith, the disaster would likely not have occurred because the Challenger would not have been launched.

Today most people attribute the cause of the Challenger disaster to the technical failure of O-rings on a solid-fuel booster, as a result of sub-freezing temperatures at Cape Canaveral the morning of the launch. Nominally, that was indeed true. But the root cause involved an institutional culture that thwarted communication and led to decision making that was oblivious to the real danger.

Sometimes it takes a disaster to teach a lesson, and sometimes it takes the anniversary of a disaster to remember the lesson.

 

(c) Copyright 2011 Arceil Leadership Ltd.   All rights reserved.

[Side Roads] For the Packers and Bears, Their Greatest Game Ever

 

Life shouldn’t be all work and no play. So a few years ago we began publishing [Side Roads], an irregular, infrequent feature here at the Minding Gaps blog. It recognizes and celebrates passions, milestones, excursions, pleasures, relationships—everything that we ultimately work for. It’s all about life’s joys, both little and large.

We post these diversionary Side Roads columns only on occasion and only on weekends. The rest of the time, we stick to the mission of this blog, as summarized in the masthead above and explained more fully on the Our Philosophy page.

Our previous Side Roads columns introduced you to my heretofore secret recipe for pesto; recounted my climb to the summit of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park; reviewed a mesmerizing novel, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett; took you along on an African safari; fondly remembered my extraordinary dad on Father’s Day; and shared the story and a few pictures of a visit to the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa.

Today we look at the 90-year rivalry between two National Football League teams, the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears.

 

by Thomas J. Lee

I grew up just outside Green Bay, Wisconsin. For the last thirty-odd years I have made my home in or near Chicago, Illinois. Each of these cities has a team in the National Football League. Both teams are as old, as venerable, and as legendary as the league itself.

Their rivalry is storied. Think of the Yankees and the Red Sox. Think of Palmer and Nicklaus. Think of Seabiscuit and War Admiral. Think of Manchester United and Liverpool, of Ali and Frazier, of Evert and Navratilova. Rivalries all, each pales against the heroic test of wills that has defined the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears since their founding in 1919.

The Packers and the Bears have played each other 181 times, twice a year for almost an entire century. They have each won more world championships than any other team. Curiously, only once before, in 1941, have they faced each other in post-season play, and never before have they played each other for a championship. That will change Sunday afternoon, when the Packers and the Bears face off in Soldier Field on the shore of ice-laden Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago. Without question, it will be their greatest game ever. Our grandchildren will probably hear stories of it.

The winner of this game, for the National Football Conference championship, will go to the Super Bowl. Now the Super Bowl is traditionally the crowning glory of American football, but this year it is so incidental as to be all but irrelevant and anticlimactic. Rather, this weekend's game, between the Packers and the Bears, is what really counts for these two teams. For them it is all that counts. If the winner of this game loses the Super Bowl, it will still be victorious in the eyes of its fans, for it will have vanquished the only team that matters.

Now I love Chicago. Truly I do. I went to graduate school here. I raised my family here. For years I wrote a newspaper column here, and I have spent most of my career here. I love the lakefront, the architecture, the museums, and the symphony. I love Navy Pier and Lake Shore Drive and the Archicenter boat tour and Wrigley Field and the University of Chicago and the rickety old Red Line and even O'Hare Airport. Almost all my friends live here, all but a few of them benighted Bears fans, and I even love them.

But I am not, and I never will be, a fan of the Chicago Bears. Never. Never, never, never. To the very marrow of my bones, to the synapses of my brain, to the soles of my feet and the tips of my fingers, to the valves of my heart and in the plasma of my blood, I am a fan, through and through, of the glorious Green Bay Packers, and that is the way it will always be.

It has always been thus, too. As far back as I can remember, the Green Bay Packers were the very center of every autumn in my hometown, a few miles down Highway 41 from Green Bay. My brother actually attended the famous Ice Bowl, the NFC championship game between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys, when the temperature at kickoff was 13 degrees below zero. Today, I own one of those gaudy yellow foam cheese heads, and I even have a frozen brick of genuine Lambeau Field turf in my kitchen icebox. I really do.

Green Bay is an improbable city to have a major sports franchise. It has a population of scarcely 100,000 people, in sharp contrast to the millions in greater Chicago and other cities with NFL teams. That alone makes the Packers unique, but there is much more to the story.

The Packers are the only major sports team to release their balance sheet every year, and they are the only team to be owned by the general public and operated on a non-profit basis. The team's by-laws call for all its assets to be given to charity in the event the team is ever moved from Green Bay. That would be unlikely in any case; since 1960, the Packers have sold every single seat for every game in their stadium. Over the course of a half-century, not one ticket has gone unsold, and there is a waiting list of thousands. No other team in major sports can claim anything remotely close to that.

Even the great George S. Halas respected the Packers. In the 1950s, Halas, the founder and longtime head coach of the Bears, drove the 200 miles to Green Bay during the off-season to urge the citizenry to build a stadium for the Packers, which were struggling through a sustained slump and had little immediate prospect for success. Until then the Packers were playing at the Green Bay East High School field (just coincidentally, the alma mater of legendary New York Times sports columnist Red Smith). Without a new stadium, the NFL would move the team from Green Bay. Voters listened to Halas and approved the new stadium.

Still the hapless Packers continued to lose. Two years later a granite statue of a man named Vince Lombardi arrived from the East Coast. He would be the new head coach and general manager of the sad-sack team. The year before his arrival, the Packers had lost all but one game in their new stadium. That season still stands as their worst ever.

The next year, under Lombardi, the Packers began winning. They started the season with a victory over the Bears and finished with more wins than losses. The year afterward, they won their division; and the year after that, they won the world championship. They would win the world championship four more times under Lombardi, including the first two Super Bowls. Today the Super Bowl trophy carries his name.

There's an important lesson for leaders everywhere in the Lombardi play book, for the great coach won all those championships with most of the same players on that pathetic, losing team he inherited: Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Jimmy Taylor, Jerry Kramer, Ray Nitschke, Forrest Gregg, Max McGee, Willie Davis, Henry Jordan, and more. They were all losers, and they knew it. Lombardi came along and made them believe in themselves, and so they did. Once they believed in themselves, they played like winners.

You can expect both teams to play like winners Sunday. The Bears have come out of nowhere to win their division; at the start of the season, experts were predicting they would win only four of their sixteen games. Bears quarterback Jay Cutler passed and ran for two touchdowns each last Sunday. The Packers have survived more than a dozen significant injuries, and they have rolled over two excellent teams en route to their NFC championship berth. Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is at the top of his game. The Packers beat the Bears three weeks ago in the regular-season finale, but the Bears prevailed back in September.

The convenient and conventional thing for me to say here would be: "May the best team win." But I cannot bring myself to do that. Not for this game. Not for any game between these two teams. No, my sentiments are all to one side. They are all on the side of the venerable, the estimable, the great and glorious Green Bay Packers. I can only speak my truth, and this is it. 

GO, PACKERS!

 

Addendum on Sunday, 23 January 2011:  The Packers won, 21 to 14, in a hard-fought game on loose turf that made proper footing difficult. Chicago quarterback Jay Cutler was hurt in the second quarter, and third-string quarterback Caleb Hanie drove the Bears to two touchdowns in the second half but also threw two interceptions, one of which ended the game. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers looked masterful on an early touchdown drive but was otherwise lackluster. Fortunately, the Packers defense stepped up to the challenge.

 

Addendum on Sunday, 6 February 2011:  The Green Bay Packers went on to win the Super Bowl and thereby become the new champion of the National Football League. The Packers defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers, 31 to 25, after pulling out to a dramatic lead early in the game but losing some momentum in the second half. Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who completed three touchdown passes, was named the game's most valuable player. For the Packers it is their thirteenth world championship; no other NFL team has nearly as many. (The Bears are in second place with nine championships. The Steelers have six championships to their credit.)

 

(c) Copyright 2011   Thomas J. Lee   All rights reserved.  

Edison Peña, Running In Defiance of 'Destiny'

 

by Thomas J. Lee

In need of a little inspiration today?

Look no further than Edison Peña, one of the Chilean miners trapped underground for two months. All the miners are paragons of endurance, to be sure. But among them, Peña stands apart: not only through the 69 days of imprisonment that he shared with the other miners, but in his own dauntless courage and in the sheer resilience of his own human spirit.

Yesterday this 34-year-old man ran the New York City Marathon, its 26.2-mile course wending through the five boroughs before ending in Central Park. Running a marathon is a big achievement for anyone. Running a marathon after training on 3-mile and 6-mile runs through dark tunnels a half-mile underground, with every reason to doubt his own survival and only a miner's lamp to light the way, is just this side of phenomenal.

For the first 17 days of the miners' ordeal, Peña did no running. There was little point, for there was little food and little hope of survival. He curled up in a fetal position and waited to die. But when the first drilling bore reached the miners and brought more food, he was able to recapture hope. So he did what a runner would do: he trimmed a pair of work shoes and began going for daily runs.

"I ran to forget I was trapped," he told the New York Daily News last week. "I became two people: the weak person who wanted simply to give up and the person who chose to be strong, to run and survive. Eventually, I chose to live."

Asked what he thought about during those runs in the mine, he offered a sentiment that could very well serve as a mantra on a beleaguered day for any of us: "What I thought about as I ran in the mine was that I was going to beat destiny. I was going to turn the tables on destiny. I was saying to that mine, I can outrun you. I'm going to outrun you. I'm going to run until you're just tired and bored of me. And I did it."

On hearing of his daily runs underground, marathon officials invited him to New York as their guest to ride in a pace car. He replied he would actually prefer to run in the marathon. He did just that. Though he needed an ice pack at mile 20, he finished more than an hour ahead of his goal to the cheers of thousands of spectators. The cheers were nice, but he was already on top of the world, quite literally.

There is a mighty lesson for all of us here. It is altogether too easy to prostrate ourselves on the doorstep of destiny, to tell ourselves that whatever our lot appears to be is meant to be. So let us take a little inspiration from Edison Peña and his fellow miners.

Let us stare down whatever destiny looks to have in store for us, and just say No thanks. Let us rise up and go for a run today, as if in miner's shoes through dark tunnels. Let us finally and defiantly cheat destiny of all its dark and dreary doomsaying, just as Edison Peña did, and one day we, too, will emerge to the cheers of throngs and taste the sweet sunshine of a different destiny, a destiny we create for ourselves.

Thank you, Señor Peña, for your inspiration to us all.

 

(c) 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved.

 Technorati Claim No. WUU227Z6455M

Example of a Very Scary Public Speaker

A colleague sent me this video of an Ohio politician declaring his candidacy for public office.

I have heard hundreds, perhaps thousands, of political speeches in my career by candidates of all stripes and persuasions. Never before have I witnessed anything like this. It is downright scary. This guy makes Howard Dean look sound asleep.

The fact that this speaker claims a master's degree in communication makes it all the more pathetic. It serves as an object lesson in what not to do as a speaker. Do not begin with hostility. Do not yell. Do not become unhinged. Do not be threatening.

I hope and trust you can do much, much better. Goodness, that should be easy.

Technorati Claim Code WUU227Z6455M

How Can Hewlett-Packard Enforce a Non-Compete Agreement Now?

 

 

by Thomas J. Lee

Everything a company says and does should support and reinforce the achievement of its strategic goals. All its statements and actions send messages to key constituencies: employees, customers, investors. When a company does something that contravenes something it has said, it begins spiraling downward.

That is the basic precept of what we call integrated strategic communication. It is at the foundation of our approach to leadership and to the communication, both implicit and explicit, that energizes and drives leadership.

Surprisingly often, you don't see it in practice. Our object lesson for today is Hewlett-Packard. Surely the iconic Silicon Valley company has insisted that all its knowledge workers sign non-compete agreements. After all, NCAs are a basic component of management. They have been for many years.

But over the Labor Day weekend, Oracle announced it was hiring as co-president Mark V. Hurd, the Hewlett-Packard chief executive who was ousted early last month for violating HP's business standards. Oracle's hiring of Mr. Hurd wasn't surprising; it had been rumored in Silicon Valley for weeks. Larry Ellison, the founder and chief executive of Oracle, had rushed to Mr. Hurd’s defense. Nor was that surprising, as Messrs. Ellison and Hurd are personal friends and tennis partners.

Here's the rub. For many years Oracle and HP were strategic partners. In some respects they still are. But last year Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. With that acquisition, Oracle is now active in some of the same markets as HP, such as servers, systems, and services. Thus, the one former HP executive with the greatest strategic knowledge of its business is now in the employ of an HP competitor. (Here is a fuller description from an industry newsletter. You may also wish to refer to this post and this post, our own two prior comments on this case.) 

What is so surprising is that HP apparently either negated Mr. Hurd’s non-compete agreement when it dismissed him last month or never required him to sign a non-compete agreement in the first place. That is just astounding.

The obvious question that all Hewlett-Packard stakeholders must be asking is how HP can possibly require other employees to sign a non-compete agreement in the future, and how HP can enforce any NCAs it already has in place. More broadly, how does HP expect to be taken seriously on anything it says?

I am sure we haven't heard the last of this. In the meantime, though, many of us will be waiting for answers.

Update 8 September 2010: Hewlett-Packard wasted no time in filing suit to prevent Mr. Hurd from revealing proprietary information to Oracle. Good. Let's see how this plays out.

(c) Copyright 2010 Arceil Leadership Ltd. All rights reserved

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How BP Can Change Its Safety Culture: A Case Study in Leadership

A Special Report and Comment

BP’s new chief executive, Robert Dudley, states that his top priority is changing the company’s culture around safety. That’s a tall order. Behemoths the size and complexity of BP don’t change overnight.

Fortunately, Mr. Dudley has a remarkable, highly successful case study in his own company’s archives. He should dig out the musty file and look it over.

One of the companies that BP purchased in its heady 1990s expansion was Chicago-based Amoco Corporation, itself the product of a 1950s merger of Standard Oil Co. (Indiana) and the American Oil Co. of Baltimore. Indeed, Mr. Dudley cut his professional teeth at Amoco. He worked there from 1979 until BP acquired Amoco in 1998.

Amoco once faced a grave safety problem of its own. Through a comprehensive intervention, in which I played a role, that company dramatically changed its safety culture. If Amoco can do it, so can BP. It won't be easy, but it can be done.

Amoco's Safety Challenge

As a matter of public record, from 1986 to 1996, Amoco lost 121 lives of employees and contractors worldwide. That's an average of one death per month.

For most companies in most industries, such a rate of fatalities is unimaginable and intolerable. BP’s numerical death toll over the last five or six years is roughly similar, though BP is larger than Amoco was, so its rate is somewhat less.

For a long time, Amoco's management looked the other way. Eventually, however, the senior leadership got fed up with the drumbeat of fatalities. Larry Fuller, the company's change-minded CEO, finally declared that creating a new culture of safety was his No. 1 priority.

He formed a cross-functional team to address the issue. The team was headed by Richard Spies, who subsequently worked with Mr. Dudley in BP Russia. As an internal consultant, I lent support to the Amoco team. (I have never had a connection to BP.)

The first thing the team did was to examine the causes of all 121 fatalities. That was important, because oil industry lore held that many fatalities were inevitable due to the flammability and lubricity of its products.

As one executive told me, “You have to remember that almost everything we make is fully designed and intended to explode sooner or later. We just want it to explode inside an engine.”

The inevitability assumption was a balm to the conscience of executives. But it didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The team’s rigorous analysis showed that only a minority of the 121 fatalities worldwide were even the nominal result of explosions or fire. Most, by far, were actually the result of carelessness. Undoubtedly most employees were usually working carefully, but the tragic toll pointed to serious problems.

The Real Causes Come to Light

In fact, the analysis found the real culprits to be a pattern of haste, neglect, and flagrant disregard for safety. More than anything, there was a pervasive and wrong-headed culture that gave priority to production over people. The company never intended to create that culture. It just happened. 

Day in and day out, too many employees and contractors were failing to take routine safety precautions: attaching fall-protection equipment, tying down ladders, locking out and tagging out valves, buckling seat belts, insisting on hard hats and steel-toe shoes, respecting no-smoking areas, and even simply obeying traffic laws.

In focus groups with employees, we came across vivid anecdotal evidence that gave color and immediacy to the problem. The conclusion was inescapable. To altogether too many managers, other things mattered more than safety. A litany of their day-to-day decisions said so.

The analysis and its conclusions were bracing but not shocking. As a company, we had given only lip service to workplace safety. Our ongoing business conversation back then was all about exploration, production, and marketing. The prevailing message to employees, both explicit and implicit, was straightforward: Success was measured in dollars.

A Comprehensive Approach Was Essential

None of that would do any longer, and we knew it. Looking for solutions, we took a bold, comprehensive approach. In ways large and small, we set out to create a new culture that would truly put safety first. We were successful.

Words had to come first, but words alone would not suffice. In a three-page letter to staff signed by all the company’s top executives, senior management emphatically said that financial results would henceforth take a back seat to safety. The leadership had to be just that blunt; otherwise, employees would continue to believe the opposite. In a culture dominated by engineers, the company also appealed to an engineer’s ethic of process control. They imposed individual goals and plans for safety performance.

Then came resources. The company created a process-driven safety management system. Thousands of managers underwent training in the system, so that everyone was on board. It included an in-house investigative agency, modeled after the U.S. government’s National Transportation Safety Board. Our trained experts, deployed around the world, would speed to the site any serious mishap, fatal or not. They would determine the fundamental “root cause” and share it with management.

The final ingredient was the visible commitment of leaders. Employees wouldn’t believe the new culture until they saw it, so they had to see it, day after day after day.

Here, management pulled all kinds of levers. Executive promotions would rest heavily on safety records. All operations around the world were to stand down so that personnel could focus on safety issues. In a company that lived in meetings, every agenda of every meeting was henceforth to begin with discussion of workplace safety—even the meetings of the board of directors and the annual shareholders meeting. 

Many other interventions and policy changes reinforced the central message. Together, all these things sent a powerful, persuasive message that safety finally did matter more than anything else.

The Happy Result . . . Until Things Changed

In the months and years that immediately followed, the company's safety performance improved noticeably. Fatalities and injuries plummeted. Today, we can confidently say that somewhere, people are alive because of the work we did.

I left Amoco in 1997, prior to its acquisition by BP. For a while afterward (BP also acquired ARCO about the same time), the toll of fatalities for BP as a whole was approximately what Amoco alone had been experiencing in the 1980s and early 1990s. It continued declining for several years.

Then, something at BP changed. I don’t know what. It does appear to be systemic, as evidence of serious problems long predated the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe this spring.

Persistent issues with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a crisis on another Gulf of Mexico platform known as Thunder Horse, and the disastrous explosion at the Texas City refinery in 2005 are corroborative.

(Just last week, BP was fined $50.6 million for safety violations at the Texas City refinery in 2009, four years after the 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers. The company has also committed to spending $500 million on safety at Texas City alone.)

Plainly, the safety culture that Amoco went so far to establish in the late 1990s is long gone. It desperately needs to be brought back.

Recognizing and Applying a Best Practice

If, as former Shell USA president John Hofmeister maintains, the industry has “earned the right” to continue drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by dint of its 30,000 successful wells over the course of decades, it will absolutely require a culture that truly values safety above production. For the sake of human life, nothing else is more important.

Turning around the BP safety culture will plainly be a formidable challenge. It won’t happen soon or quickly. But, as Amoco’s experience convincingly shows, it can be done. Mr. Dudley should just ask around.

— TJL          

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By the Numbers: Jobs, Salaries, and Budgets at Hewlett-Packard

 

By the Numbers is a bimonthly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion.

Since its inception last summer, By the Numbers has explored numerical aspects of a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, trust in business, information overload, strategic communication, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, the productivity of meetings, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

You can read any or all of those posts (and hundreds of other short essays, as well) whenever you wish, just by scrolling down. For a particular subject, use the search button in the right column.

 

 

Last week in this space we waxed eloquent on the dismissal of Mark V. Hurd as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. Before we move on, we offer this statistical picture of the company in the wake of his five-year tenure.

These facts and figures have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and other publications.

 

Hewlett-Packard’s revenue has skyrocketed from $80 billion in 2004 to $115 billion in 2009, while Cisco Systems’ has risen proportionately even more, from $22 billion to $36 billion, but as IBM’s has stagnated, growing only from $95 billion to $96 billion, in the same time frame.

In 2009, Hewlett-Packard announced across-the-board cuts in employee compensation. Mr. Hurd took a 20 percent reduction, but only on his salary, which accounted for a small share of his overall compensation. Managers took a cut of 10 percent, salaried workers 5 percent, and hourly workers 2.5 percent.

HP’s famed research and development budget was 4 percent of revenue in 2005, and hovers just above 2 percent now, a potentially devastating reduction for a company that is known for its innovation, and whose slogan is Invent.

Under Mr. Hurd's tenure, more than 15,000 Hewlett-Packard employees lost their jobs, while his total compensation during the last two years exceeded $72 million.

HP employees recently gave the company only 1.6 stars, out of 5 possible, as a place to work. By comparison, two companies with whom HP competes for labor, Cisco Systems and IBM, get much higher marks: 3.5 stars for Cisco and 3.7 stars for IBM.

Employees of Hewlett-Packard give their former CEO an approval rating of only 30 percent, while employees of IBM give their CEO a rating of 40 percent, and employees of Cisco give theirs a rating of 60 percent.

Prior to Mr. Hurd’s dismissal, almost two out of every three HP employees said they intended to seek employment elsewhere as soon as the economy improved.

 

Questions: What do these facts and figures tell you about Mr. Hurd as a chief executive? What lessons can you derive for your own leadership? Do you believe that economic adversity invariably depresses employee engagement? How can a company whose employees suffer under a CEO restore their engagement in the wake of his departure?

 

 

 

 

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Should Hewlett-Packard's Board Have Fired its CEO?

Hewlett-Packard’s board of directors demanded and received the resignation of CEO Mark V. Hurd last week after an internal investigation, prompted by a complaint of sexual harassment from a vendor, uncovered irregularities in his expense account.

The allegation of sexual harassment proved unfounded, and the amount of money in question for the expense reimbursement was reported to be between $1,000 and $20,000. Mr. Hurd said an assistant had prepared his expense vouchers, but he took responsibility and offered to reimburse the company for the difference. The board insisted he go.

By all accounts, Mr. Hurd was performing very well as chief executive of HP since 2005, when he took over from ousted CEO Carly Fiorina. Investors enjoyed an average annual total shareholder return exceeding 25 percent. Many employees were chafing, however, under his cost-cutting regime. Pay cuts were the order of the day even as the company was making a great deal of money.

A few more complicating details: Under terms of his contract, Mr. Hurd is walking away with a stipend of $12.2 million; counting stocks and options, his total package may approach $40 million. The company's employees are, for the time being, without a leader. Investors suddenly lost billions of dollars in valuation, perhaps temporarily, as the stock plummeted. The woman who filed the complaint turns out to have a checkered history, and she has stated publicly it was not her intent to have Mr. Hurd dismissed. Shortly before she filed the complaint, HP had decided not to renew her contract.

Here is a report from The New York Times that describes the board’s decision making. The article points out that the board was primarily concerned with public-relations damage control. Here is an Associated Press account, and here is another report, from Venture Beat, a Silicon Valley newsletter.

There are two schools of thought here.

One school is zero tolerance. It holds that the CEO must set the ethical tone for the entire organization. Any deviation from propriety—indeed, any appearance of impropriety—condones ethical laxity. This perspective argues that it’s unreasonable to hold other employees accountable for standards that senior executives only wink at. By this thinking, the board was fully justified in firing Mr. Hurd. Indeed, any other course of action would be unimaginable.

The other school of thought is minimal deviation. It recognizes that all people are imperfect, and it acknowledges ambiguity and complexity, so it expects rigid perfection from no one. It still expects leaders to set the moral example, but often in a gray cloud of uncertainty. By this thinking, the board should have taken into account the complexities of the situation. Instead of dismissing the chief executive, it might instead have imposed a penalty of some sort, taken the reimbursement, and perhaps responded in other ways as well, short of dismissal.

Jack Welch, the iconic CEO of General Electric in the 1990s, had the practice of using a 2 X 2 matrix for evaluating managers on both their demonstrated values and their business acumen.

For those managers in the northeast quadrant, who consistently both honored the values and performed well, Mr. Welch said the future was clear and bright: onward and upward. For those managers in the southwest quadrant, who did neither, the answer was equally obvious, if not so pleasant.

The difficulty came in the northwest and southeast cells: managers who did one but not the other.

Mr. Welch suggested that managers who honored the values but didn’t perform well should be given a second chance in a different role, perhaps even a third chance. If they consistently failed to perform, they would have to leave on that reason alone.

He further suggested that managers who performed well but ran roughshod over the values be counseled as to the importance of the values. If, over time, they continued to flout the values, then they, too, would have to leave for that reason alone, in spite of their good business performance.

In the case of Hewlett-Packard and Mark Hurd, one could argue that a serious financial penalty coupled with intensive values-based coaching might have served the company and its stakeholders better than outright dismissal.

Mr. Hurd’s friend Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of Oracle, was quoted yesterday in The Times as essentially taking that point of view. He was critical of the Hewlett Packard board. But Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, professor of management at Yale University, argued just the opposite. He applauded the HP board's decision last week, though he also had harsh words for the contract that Mr. Hurd negotiated with the board.

What do you think? Why do you think the way you do?

Here are some questions to ponder:
 

• Have we created a kind of third rail in business, such that any chief executive demonstrating errant judgment is automatically dismissed, with a large payout to boot?
  
  
• Should the company's public image in a situation like this be the board's most important concern? If not, why not?
  
  
• Can we reasonably expect perfection from any leader?
  
  
• What ethical transgressions do justify a zero-tolerance policy? What issues require something less?
  
  
• What do you think of executive contracts that provide for substantial payouts on dismissal?
  
  
• Should the executive's business acumen and performance be taken into account here, at all?

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What Can We Learn From Failures of Leadership?

 

There’s a fascinating article today in the Science section of The New York Times on learning from disaster. It builds off the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico but also cites other historic engineering failures. Among them are the sinking of the Titanic and the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor.

One of the most notorious engineering failures was the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge over Puget Sound amid high winds just months after it opened in 1940. (For many years, a 16 mm. video recording of the bridge collapse was the most exciting thing about high-school physics class. I remember viewing it two or three times. Nowadays you can find several versions on YouTube.)

The Times article today, written by William J. Broad, reports that engineers have learned to study such disasters for insights on how to avoid similar design mistakes in the future. “Nobody wants failures,” said Henry Petroski, a historian of engineering at Duke University, “but you also don’t want to let a good crisis go to waste.”

That got me thinking. Taking the same tack, and applying it more broadly to leadership, we can well ask ourselves what we can learn from failures of leadership. Traditionally, we have looked at successful leadership for lessons. But success has a thousand fathers, as the old adage goes. Its true critical success factors are often ambiguous. Perhaps abject failures are easier to analyze for insights in the negative.

What case studies of failed leadership would you suggest? What lessons would you derive from them?

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By the Numbers: Worst Cases of Low Trust

By the Numbers is a weekly feature presenting business data that is noteworthy, puzzling, alarming, widely misunderstood or misinterpreted, or otherwise deserving of explanation, comment, or clarification. We accompany it with thought-provoking questions or commentary for reflection and discussion. It usually appears on Monday.

Since its inception last summer, By the Numbers has explored numerical aspects of a wide variety of issues: employee engagement, organizational culture, information overload, trust in business, strategic communication, layoffs, job satisfaction, Internet usage, the productivity of meetings, nonverbal communication, and fear in the workplace, among others.

You can read any or all of those posts whenever you wish, just by scrolling down to the hundreds of short essays that follow this one. For a particular issue, use the search button in the right column.

We are devoting several weeks to the erosion of trust and confidence of Americans in major institutions. Last week we looked at institutions that have maintained the public’s trust. Today we look at some more problematic cases.

Certain sectors of the business world and the government seem unable or uninterested in nurturing the trust of Americans. New data from the Pew Research Center document it.

Hollywood (our shorthand for the entire entertainment industry) has the trust of 33 percent of Americans, according to Pew. Labor unions have the trust of only 32 percent. Federal agencies and departments generally come in at 31 percent, as do the national news media.

Even worse off are large companies, at 25 percent, Congress at 24 percent, and banks and financial institutions, at 22 percent.

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56 Seconds of Truth

Why is it that so many business leaders so rarely speak their unvarnished truth with candor, clarity, conviction, and credibility?

Here is an example of one who did. It’s a video of Sean Parker, former president of Facebook, commenting on the demise of Friendster and MySpace. He was speaking at Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored conference last week in New York City.

It deserves 56 seconds of your time, if for no other reason than it is a refreshing bucket of cold water.

Just click here.

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Quote / Unquote: Jim Nordstrom on Employee Empowerment

Quote / Unquote is a feature that appears irregularly but frequently. It offers a simple, noteworthy quotation on some aspect of leadership, communication, or business. In most cases we also provide context, comment, or questions to stir discussion.

 

Whole books have been written on employee empowerment, but few offer such an inspiring case study as Nordstrom, the top-tier American fashion store. Anyone who has shopped frequently at Nordstrom is familiar with its legendary and well-earned reputation for customer service.

Once, I stopped briefly at the men’s shoe department at a Nordstrom on my way out of the store. I had already purchased what I came for. But I noticed a pair of Allen-Edmonds loafers like the very ones I was wearing. A salesman approached and noticed the similarity. “Need another pair?” he asked.

“Well, the ones I have are just a wee small,” I replied. “They’re fine much of the time, but when I fly, which is often,  my feet seem to expand, and then they become unbearably tight. I suppose I could just wear different shoes whenever I travel.”

“You could, but that wouldn’t be right,” he said as he showed me to a chair. “Who on earth sold you these, anyway?’

“Actually I got them here.”

“Then it definitely isn’t right.”

Now, I had already worn these shoes for six months. They were not new. They weren’t even close to new.

The salesman insisted I take off the shoes. He disappeared in back and then re-emerged with an identical new pair a half-size larger. He was taking the initiative to replace them on his own and at no cost to me.

I protested. “It was my choice to buy the tighter fit in the first place,” I said. “I had wanted loafers to be snug. They just turned out to be too snug on airplanes.”

Still, he was insistent. Five minutes later I left with a new pair of shoes on my feet. 

That’s the way it goes at Nordstrom.

In The Nordstrom Way: The Inside Story of America’s #1 Customer Service Company by Robert Spector and Patrick D. McCarthy (John Wiley, 1996), the late James F. Nordstrom is quoted as saying:

 

People will work hard when they are given the freedom

to do the job the way they think it should be done,

when they [can] treat customers the way

they like to be treated. When you start taking away

their incentive and start giving them rules,

 

boom, you’ve killed their creativity. 

 

For many years Nordstrom store personnel were asked to abide by just two simple rules. The first rule was: In all situations, use your good judgment. The second rule was: In other situations, refer back to Rule No. 1.

 

As you reflect on this question and on the time-honored Nordstrom policy, ask yourself what rules you can abandon and how you can develop and use the good judgment of people on your team. 

 

 

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An Orchid for Google

Today we’re introducing another occasional feature. Orchids and Onions will offer encomiums for laudable decisions or noble behavior, especially in challenging circumstances, and criticism for poor decisions or untoward behavior. We’ll bestow orchids on people or organizations that are doing or trying to do the right thing, and onions on people or organizations that are doing the wrong thing or just behaving heedlessly. Today’s column marks our very first orchid.

Companies face difficult ethical issues all the time. Often, correctly resolving these issues is a matter of rereading the corporate values and looking in the mirror. The difficulty is greater when doing business in other countries, where a company naturally wants to respect local laws and cultural norms while also doing right by its own values.

China’s business environment poses a particular challenge. The world’s biggest and  fastest-growing market has an insatiable appetite for online information and connectivity, which makes it fertile ground for high-tech companies like Google. Unfortunately, the government has a reckless and even aggressive disregard for human rights that we Westerners pretty much take for granted. The inevitable collision is now occurring in cyberspace.

Some high-tech companies, most notably Yahoo, have looked the other way. They have been complicit partners in China’s oppressive cyber warfare, as when Yahoo enabled the government to imprison four dissidents.

This week, however, Google signaled it would be different. After the company learned that powerful forces within China—read: the government—were hacking the Gmail accounts of dissidents, Google declared it would not tolerate government interference in online searches and its email service. If it has to remove itself from China, the company said, it will.

That would be unfortunate, for it would leave one billion people dependent on another search engine, Baidu, that isn’t so noble. Moreover, it would be a giant step backward in the global integration of knowledge.

Still, the Chinese government’s determination to control and stifle the exchange of information and ideas is unacceptable. Google’s principled stand is refreshing and fully deserving of our first orchid.

A Lawsuit for Our Times

 

Anyone interested in business communication and employee engagement should make a point of following the arguments and decision in City of Ontario v. Quon, a lawsuit that has just been accepted on appeal by the U.S. Supreme Court.

At issue is whether employees have a right to privacy in using electronic devices supplied by their employers. The high court will rule on the case by the end of this term in June.

Police Sgt. Jeff Quon and three other officers had sued the City of Ontario, California, after their superiors read personal text messages the officers had sent on the city-owned devices. The city had an explicit policy in place that employees had no guarantee of privacy.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th District ruled last year that the officers did have a “reasonable expectation” of privacy, because a supervisor had told the officers they could use the devices for personal communication, so long as they paid for any excessive use.

One of the judges on the three-judge appellate panel, Kim McLane Wardlaw, said the city’s formal policy was marginalized by the “operational reality” of the supervisor's informal policy.

If nothing else, the case serves as a salient reminder that employers must have clear, consistent policies—and then follow those policies to the letter. At a minimum, that entails detailed training for all supervisors, lest the supervisors give mixed or muddled signals to employees. As for employees, it would be wise for them to remember that digital messages often find unintended audiences.

You can read more here.

 

Note: Minding Gaps will be on holiday break beginning tomorrow. We will return on Monday, January 4, 2010. Have a wonderful holiday season and a terrific new year’s celebration. Good luck to the Wisconsin Badgers in the Champs Sports Bowl on December 29 and to the Northwestern Wildcats in the Outback Bowl on January 1. Celebrate safely, everyone!

 

Answers to Your Questions on Social Media

 

The questions about social media just keep coming. If your CEO or chairman asked, could you confidently answer any of these questions, let alone all of them?

• How are high-performance organizations making the most of social media? What are they being sure to do, and what are they being sure to avoid?

• Is there a compelling value proposition for proactively using social media?

• Is a lot of what you hear about social media just the usual hype? Is there any real value to a company? Is it just another fad? What can anyone say of value in 140 characters, anyway?

• Are high-performance companies really using social media to connect with employees faster than ever? If so, how is it working? Exactly how are they doing it?

• How are they using social media to enhance and maintain their reputation in the marketplace? How well is it working?

• How are high-performance companies using social media to respond to rumors? To reach and attract Millennium Generation employees? To exercise more agility in the marketplace? To monitor cyberspace conversations? To troubleshoot customer complaints and issues?

• Are they just using the "old standbys" of social media: Twitter and Facebook? Or are they identifying other, lesser-known social-media sites that reach niche stakeholders?

• Are high-performance companies forbidding employees from reading any social-media sites while at work? If so, is such a ban effective? Doesn't it backfire with Millennial employees?

• Are executives of high-performing organizations blogging? Have these blogs taken the place of conventional, slower media? Do the executives write their own? Who has time to ghost them? Is ghostwriting publicly acknowledged?

• In short, what's working, and what isn't working, in the new world of social media?

We’ll get the answers to those questions—and to your own specific questions about social media—in a battery of studies in early 2010. We’ll conduct four studies on social media. Each will target a particular sector. One will look at social media for service companies such as law firms, medical practices, airlines, engineering and construction companies, consulting firms, and hospitals. Another will examine social media for the retail sector. Still another study will explore social media for manufacturing companies. Finally, yet another study will delve into social media for non-profit organizations.   

We’re enrolling corporatations and organizations as co-sponsors of these four studies now. To inquire, just send us a note (to info@arceil.com) with your name and telephone number or telephone (+1.847.247.2241), and we will follow up.

These studies will produce real-world answers for real-world questions in each of these four sectors. They will find real-world solutions for real-world problems. Each study will be broad enough to provide guidance on general strategies and policies but specific enough to be appropriate and relevant to its sector.

Only those companies that co-sponsor the projects will benefit from them. The studies will be proprietary to the co-sponsoring companies for one full year from the completion of the projects.

Each co-sponsor will help design and customize the research, so the studies will reflect every co-sponsor’s own concerns and interests. They will result in relevant findings and actionable recommendations. Best of all, because several companies will join together to sponsor it, each company's share of the total cost will be moderate.

The final reports will have a written executive summary and PowerPoint slides for presentation of findings. At the conclusion of the projects, we will host webinars for the co-sponsors that present the findings and responds to questions.

Our initial research shows a wide variety of approaches and practices, in terms of both substance and tone. Our intent is to establish a benchmark of policies that each sponsor can use for evaluation and improvement.

We will enroll co-sponsors on a first-come, first-serve basis. Only those companies that co-sponsor the projects will share the results.

The research will be managed by Thomas J. Lee, founder and president of Arceil Leadership Ltd. A subject-matter expert and frequent speaker on leadership and organizational communication, Tom has culled best practices from many major, pace-setting corporations: Nordstrom, Starbucks, Hewlett-Packard, Federal Express, Harley-Davidson, Chick-fil-A, 3M, McDonald’s, DuPont, Motorola, Weyerhaeuser, Walgreens, and others.

A former journalist and speechwriter for Fortune 100 CEOs, Tom is an alumnus of the University of Chicago, where he serves as a mentor to graduate students, and of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His clients have included the No. 1 or No. 2 company in such disparate industries as heavy manufacturing, finance, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, motorcycles, energy, food and beverage, and chemicals, among others. Beginning in 2010, he will teach an online course in communication and engagement for the University of California.

Please contact us at 847-247-2241 for details, including fees and procedures, or write to us at info@arceil.com. Or write to us at info@arceil.com, and we can arrange a convenient time to talk by telephone. We look forward to working with you.

Verizon Sends Its Employees a Message of Chicanery

 

I left Verizon’s mobile-phone service in a huff years ago. While I haven’t been happy with my current carrier (are you listening, AT&T?), I am loath to return to Verizon. Just yesterday, New York Times columnist David Pogue reminded me why. Read his column here.

In a nutshell, Pogue is irritated at Verizon’s billing practices. He complains about an early-termination fee that amounts to a profit center. Even worse, he writes, is a policy of billing for accidental data downloading—and worst of all, designing and programming telephones in such a way as to make those mishaps all but inevitable.

Pogue quotes a whistle-blowing Verizon employee who explains how the chicanery works:

"The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Around the OK button on a typical flip phone are the up, down, left, right arrows. If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data. Not cool. I've had phones for years, and I sometimes do that mistake to this day, as I'm sure you have. Legal, yes; ethical, no.

"Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That's over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!

"Our marketing, billing, and technical departments are all aware of this. But they have failed to do anything about it—and why? Because if you get 87 million customers to pay $1.99, why stop this revenue? Customer Service might credit you if you call and complain, but this practice is just not right.

"Now, you can ask to have this feature blocked. But even then, if you one of those buttons by accident, your phone transmits data; you get a message that you cannot use the service because it's blocked—but you just used 0.06 kilobytes of data to get that message, so you are now charged $1.99 again!

"They have started training us reps that too many data blocks are being put on accounts now; they're actually making us take classes called Alternatives to Data Blocks. They do not want all the blocks, because 40% of Verizon's revenue now comes from data use. I just know there are millions of people out there that don't even notice this $1.99 on the bill."

Pogue reports that he is deluged with mail from unhappy Verizon customers.  

“I realize that it's a business, that Verizon exists to make money,” writes Pogue. “But the part I don't get is, why doesn't Verizon calculate the business cost of making customers unhappy? Surely some accountant can show that customer anger over these fees and dirty button tricks translate into negative corporate image, and therefore lost business."

Pogue asks: “Why wouldn't it be a hugely profitable move to start pitching yourself as the good cell company, the one that actually likes its customers?”

From my own perspective, I just wonder what kind of employee engagement Verizon expects to get as a result of policies like these. When your own employees are writing vitriolic notes to a New York Times columnist, you have a lot of reason to look at your leadership in the mirror.